In a true homage to croneyism, Niners Nation stats writer and unapologetic shill for Football Outsiders, Danny Tuccito (Florida Danny), has been hired by FO as a new assistant editor to editor-in-chief Aaron Schatz. Niners Nation initially planned to hold Danny hostage with a franchise tag and demand two first round picks and a case of Pacifico, but we decided to play nice and let him walk to pursue his dream. We're suckers like that. If FO is nice they'll at least send us a six pack of Natural Light as thanks for developing this tremendous talent.
But in all seriousness, we extend the heartiest of congratulations to Danny as he pursues a pretty cool position with Football Outsiders. Among other things, his responsibilities will include developing new stats, handling a fantasy sit-start article Bill Barnwell used to do for ESPN, and FO Premium's 24-hour fantasy football answering service.
He'll have one last "regular" column tomorrow regarding draft busts (looking at things from a statistical perspective). After that he may drop in with a post on occasion, but he'll be focusing his efforts at Football Outsiders. As I too am an unapologetic shill for a lot of FO's work, we'll be linking to him whenever possible.
While Danny will still be around NN here and there, we can't thank him enough for the insane efforts he put into his posts. While his columns occasionally required a PhD to understand, he helped us all learn a lot more about some of the intricacies of football. For those that don't know how he came to NN, I was poking around the comments of a Matt Maiocco game thread when he was still at the Press Democrat. Danny posted a Mike Nolan drinking game. I emailed him to see if I could post it at NN, and the rest as they say is history.
We wish him the best of luck over at Football Outsiders.